Fleek has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round to accelerate development of its AI-powered marketplace for the global secondhand clothing industry, taking the company’s total funding to $45 million.
The round was led by Burda Principal Investments, with participation from eBay, Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, Y Combinator, FJ Labs, H14 and Pioneer Fund.
Founded in 2021, Fleek is an AI-native marketplace that is building infrastructure behind the global secondhand clothing trade, using artificial intelligence to digitise processes that have traditionally relied on manual sorting, grading and offline trading.
Demand for secondhand clothing continues to accelerate with the market estimated to be worth more than $200 billion globally, is growing three times faster than new apparel and is expected to reach $400 billion by 2030.
Despite that growth, Fleek argues that the industry’s biggest challenge remains supply. The company says as many as 24 billion secondhand garments move through the global supply chain every year, with much of the process still dependent on manual assessment and inconsistent grading standards.
Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO of Fleek, said,
“Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it. It travels thousands of miles, gets sorted by hand in a warehouse in Karachi, and finds its way back to a vintage shop in London or New York, if it’s lucky. We started Fleek because that system is broken, the market it serves is exploding, and nobody is building the technology and infrastructure to fix it.”
Its AI technology is designed to address those challenges by identifying, grading and pricing garments in seconds using vision-language models trained on millions of real clothing items. The platform then matches inventory from more than 2,000 suppliers with a global network of over 50,000 retailers, resellers and boutiques across more than 100 countries.
Sanket Agarwal, co-founder and CTO of Fleek, said,
“There’s more data locked inside the global secondhand supply chain than almost any other market, yet historically very little of it has been captured. We’ve built the world’s first AI trained specifically to understand secondhand inventory — what it is, what it’s worth, who wants it and where demand exists. Every transaction improves that understanding, creating an intelligence layer we believe will become critical infrastructure for the future of the industry.”
Fleek says bringing inventory online in this way enables suppliers to reach more buyers, helps retailers source stock more efficiently and creates a continuously improving marketplace as AI learns from every transaction.
The latest investment will be used to further develop Fleek’s AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering team, scale its technology platform and continue growing its international buyer and supplier network.
Julian von Eckartsberg, Managing Director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said:
“We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche. We know what it takes to build a platform that scales in this market. From its growing supplier network to the technology behind it, Fleek is building the infrastructure the next generation of fashion will rely on.”
